excerpts from the book

The Politics of Meaning

by Michael Lerner

Addison-Wesley, 1997

Don't be afraid to work for a more just and caring society

***

Most Americans hunger for meaning and purpose in life. Yet
we are caught within a web of cynicism that makes us question
whether there could be any higher purpose besides material self-interest
and looking out for number one.

***

We hunger to be acknowledged as people who care about something
higher and more important than our own self-interest. We hunger
for communities of meaning that can transcend the individualism
and selfishness that we see around us and that will provide an
ethical and spiritual framework that gives our lives some higher
purpose.

***

We [find] thousands of Americans - from every walk of life,
ethnic and religious background, political persuasion and lifestyle
- filled with lives of pain and self-blame, and turning to the
political Right because the Right [speaks] about the collapse
of families, the difficulty of teaching good values to children,
the fear of crime, and the absence of spirituality in their lives.
The Right [seems] to understand their hunger for community and
connection.

***

... a seeming indifference or hostility or anger. ... produced
by the frustration of a deep yearning for connection with others,
a pessimism about one's ability to ever get one's needs met, and
a deep shame about one's own imagined failures. The same frustration
accounts for most of the violence, destructiveness, and other
irrational behavior we see in daily life.

***

In advanced industrial societies today, the circle of people
for whom we are willing to make sacrifices or whose interests
really concern us has narrowed in recent years.

***

Because most of us doubt the possibility of people standing
strongly in solidarity with one another, we rarely think we can
change much about the big picture of the economy or the realities
of social or political life... And because everyone is thinking
this way, there is no social force to stand up to corporations
as they reduce the number of people they employ, globalize their
investments, and use their political clout to oppose environmental
sanity.

***

Elites of wealth and power have managed to convince many middle-income
Americans that they ought to identify with the interests of the
wealthy and powerful instead of with those of the less fortunate.

***

The ethos of selfishness and materialism has allowed many
people to accept cuts in social service programs as the price
for cutting their own taxes and those of the rich... the very
same selfishness that allows [people] to shut their ears to the
needs of the poor, or to the impact of American economic policies
on the well-being of many people in the Third World, is what allows
their wives or husbands, boyfriends or girlfriends, children or
neighbors, to act on selfish or insensitive ways.

***

The Right has mobilized [anger] against various minority groups
in the United States. Historically, the role of the demeaned Other-blamed
for disruptions of safety, security, and morality-has been assigned
first and foremost to African-Americans, and subsequently to feminists
("uppity women"), homosexuals, communists (and more
recently, liberals), Jews, various immigrants, and other minorities.
By deflecting onto these demeaned Others the anger that people
might reasonably have expressed toward an economic and social
system that rewards selfishness, the Right has managed to play
both sides of the street. On the one side, it defends the economic
and social system that proudly proclaims its commitment to me-firstism
and promises that if everyone just looks out for himself or herself,
the result will be a good world for all. On the other side, it
articulates the pain that people feel when this ethos of selfishness
permeates private life, and finds other groups to blame for this
pain.

***

... many people are attracted to the Right's vision of a community
in which all divisiveness is subordinated to the authority of
family or nation.

***

... the most important reason that the Right has been so successful
in recent American politics is that it makes people feel better
about themselves and their lives. It addresses some of the central
manifestations of the crisis of meaning-as reflected in family
problems, rising crime, and the general decline of values and
community-and it tells people that these are not caused by their
own personal failures, but because there is something deeply wrong
in the larger culture. This kind of analysis reduces self-blame;
it allows people to stop punishing themselves for what is wrong
in their lives. People respond with deep gratitude for this message,
which the Right has effectively translated into political support
for a legislative and social agenda that few of its adherents
have ever thought out nor care about very much. People vote for
the Right because they feel understood and cared for by it. They
trust the Right-but not because it has managed to win the national
policy debate, of which, in most cases, its adherents know very
little.

These dynamics are evident in the powerful success of right-wing
radio talk-show hosts who reframe people's personal pain in racist,
sexist, or homophobic directions. The radio hosts provide a simple
and powerful answer: "The reason you are being denied recognition,
love, and meaning is that the liberals have given these scarce
commodities to someone else, and they've set up society in such
a way that these others will get what you badly need. It's only
if we can dismantle government and the programs that they've created
to benefit these special interests that you, the American majority,
have any chance of getting the caring you deserve but which these
liberals and their various client groups are withholding from
you."

This message resonates deeply with many Americans because
it captures a real truth: people do not receive the recognition
they deserve or the meaning that they need in order to build satisfying
lives. The Right unfairly blames this lack on liberal programs,
on feminism, or on allegedly selfish groups pursuing their narrow
self-interest. Affirmative action, for example, is now popularly
cast as a selfishness program that unfairly favors groups who,
in any event, are too focused on their own needs and not adequately
sensitive to the needs of the larger community. The Right will
continue to get away with this kind of distortion until liberals
and progressives can understand that the resentment people feel
is legitimate: they really are in pain, they really do not get
recognized in this society, and they have a right to be angry.
Until the Left can validate this anger and articulate this pain
by speaking the language of a progressive politics of meaning,
liberals will surely continue to decline in popularity.

***

In most Western societies, productivity or efficiency is measured
by the degree to which any individual or institution or legislation
or social practice increases wealth or power. To pay attention
to the bottom line is thus defined as paying attention to the
degree to which the person or the project in question succeeds
in maximizing wealth and power. Other goals are ancillary-acceptable
only if they help accomplish (or, at least, do not thwart) the
material goal.

A progressive politics of meaning posits a new bottom line.
An institution or social practice is to be considered efficient
or productive to the extent that it fosters ethically, spiritually,
ecologically, and psychologically sensitive and caring human beings
who can maintain long-term, loving personal and social relationships.
While this new definition of productivity does not reject the
importance of material well-being, it subsumes that concern within
an expanded view of "the good life": one that insists
on the primacy of spiritual harmony, loving relationships, mutual
recognition, and work that | contributes to the common good.

***

...millions of people .... were ethically engaged with the
social change movements of the 1960s and 1970s, but ...today live
private lives in part because they can see no political organization
that plausibly speaks to their sensibilities. The political struggles
of this generation of baby boomers awakened millions of Americans
to an ethos of caring for others that was manifested in the civil
rights movement, the antiwar movement, the women's movement, and
the social justice and environmental movements.

Conservatives have correctly pointed out the ways in which
these groups sometimes flirted with a counter-cultural ethos of
individual fulfillment and unchecked self-indulgence that often
undermined the moral content of the social change movements. There
were moments when "liberation" was construed to mean
freedom to do whatever one wanted to do, without regard for the
consequences to others. To the extent that counter-cultural and
political movements fell into this way of thinking or acting,
they were quintessentially mainstream, providing yet another way
for the dominant ethos of the market to permeate and shape mass
consciousness.

... even in the 1960s and 1970s, there was within these social
change movements a counter-tendency, often explicitly challenging
counter-cultural indulgence, that emphasized social solidarity
and caring for others, that rejected moral relativism, and that
articulated a powerful moral critique of the alienation and injustice
of the contemporary world. | Millions of people who went through
that experience remain deeply committed to social justice and
to building a more humane and loving society. Many of them have
despaired that it ever would be possible to achieve those ends,
and have become involved in lifestyles that on the surface seem
superficially unconcerned about larger issues. Yet, like so many
people in the religious world and in the labor movement, they
could be mobilized to a new politics of love and caring were they
to learn about it and come to believe that it was possible. Having
been burnt by past failures, these former activists will not quickly
jump into new political movements. Yet, as a meaning-oriented
movement gains momentum. many of them will feel a homecoming that
reconnects to their deepest hopes.

These are some of the groups from whom the movement for a
politics of meaning will draw its initial support. They will become
the transformative agents who move these ideas into the mainstream
of American society. These people respond out of a real inner
need, not from a commitment to an abstract idea, nor out of a
sense that someone else ought to be treated differently. These
people know that they cannot secure the kind of life they deeply
desire, unless much changes in our society-its structure of values,
its relationship to spiritual values, and its opportunities for
mutual recognition. These are radical needs. Unlike needs for
economic well-being or political rights, these cannot be fulfilled
inside our society as it currently is constructed. Nor can these
be fulfilled by buying off any one group. In that sense, the condition
for the fulfillment of our needs for meaning is the condition
for the liberation of our entire society from a materialist and
individualist ethos.

***

No wonder that the typically secular, rational, liberal intellectual
often has trouble getting the juices flowing for constituencies
that have found some life energy being expressed in the world
of right-wing religious experience. It is not that these people
have been brainwashed into right-wing ideas. Rather, they have
experienced a touch of meaning and purpose, while those who challenge
the ideas put forward by right-wing churches articulate their
critique in a technocratic and deadening style.

***

p75

Sports

America's enormous interest in spectator sports is not accompanied
by a widespread participation in sports. People love sports as
fans - as people who do not engage in the physical contact of
the game but who vicariously participate in an imagined community
of meaning and purpose, in which "we" are fighting against
some "them." The sense of participation in a community-especially
a community that is outside the normal constraints-that acts out
its enthusiasm in somewhat outrageous fashion, and that permits
people to be irrational, to yell and scream for their team, and
to behave in ways that are not controlled is what makes sports
so energetically exciting.

Though the form of these "pseudo-communities" (in
Peter Gabel's phrase) replicates the competitiveness of the larger
market, it is not the competition of "all against all"
that Hobbes described, but rather of "a we against a we,"
in which our "we" gives us a sense of home and place.
It is a pseudo-community because the connections last only as
long as the game and the victory party, but do not extend to the
rest of our lives. Those in our pseudo-community do not worry
about us when we are sick or when we have family problems or when
we may be out of work. Our momentary high disappears; our life
situation remains unchanged and just as alienating as ever. Yet,
like every momentary "high," it feels good while it
lasts. The hungrier that people are for some form of connection
that permits them to experience being part of a "we,"
the more frenetic is their connection to "the team."
With this attachment, people begin to see their own lives as being
validated or negated depending on how well their team is doing-hence
the fantasy that "we" are winning (or losing) and that
"we" are "the best" (or not).

Moreover, sports is the one arena which most closely approximates
what the rest of the society claims to be: an arena in which reward
is allocated according to merit. How well an athlete's capabilities
are developed actually shapes his or her chances for success.
By emotionally investing in sports, spectators can covertly (and
as it happens, ineffectively and therefore safely) rebel against
the lies of the larger competitive market. With this surge of
energy, we transcend the emotional deadness of the world of work.
For that very reason, sports (along with sex) becomes a major
topic of discussion whenever workers are allowed to communicate,
and provides important confirmation that they are still alive
and have not lost touch with the life energy of the planet,

***

p84

Many of those engaged in shaping today's mass culture are
disillusioned liberals and former idealists who, as part of the
process of reconciling themselves to a life aimed at maximizing
their own individual well-being, have come to believe that their
own youthful commitment to social change was silly or potentially
destructive. So they have become willing participants in the media
assassination of any life energy that cannot be reduced to simplistic
formulas that teach us to contain our desires for loving connection.
Having bought into Hollywood wisdom about what the audience "really"
wants, they use their often considerable creative talents to find
innovative ways to present television shows and movies that, in
the final analysis repeat the standard cynicism and despair of
the age.

The media works with other cultural forces as an idealism-quasher,
particularly when it redefines in reductionist terms those moments
in which a community has experienced transcendence and optimism.
A classic case is the media's systematic lies and distortions
about the meaning of the 1960s in general and the movement to
end the Vietnam War in particular.

The repression of collective memory of the Vietnam War, the
continuing refusal to acknowledge the millions of deaths caused
by American intervention, and the inability to seriously confront
the idealism of those millions of young people who protested at
the time, have helped shape our current period and its despair.
This enforced historical amnesia has made it impossible for anyone
who lived through that period to integrate his or her own life
with some larger sense of its historical meaning. Instead, the
image-shapers have attempted to sidestep their own youthful idealism
by allowing both sides (those who protested and those who perpetrated
crimes) to come together in the empty image of "generational"
solidarity and Woodstock nostalgia.

The media has developed a "master narrative" that
focuses on momentary youthful enthusiasm and idealism, mixed with
a distorting dose of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Retrospectives
define a generation's memories of itself, and how that generation
quickly "grew up," recognized that it was on the wrong
path, and except for a few dropouts and many drug-scarred casualties,
went on to become a yuppified success story. Whenever a story
is told about someone from the 1960s, that person is assimilated
into the master narrative, and the parts that do not fit are ignored
or denied. Measured against this media version, anyone who has
remained committed to social change (and there are literally millions
of baby boomers who are) must see herself or himself as an oddball
who has no likely set of allies should she or he move from memory
and fantasy to contemporary political action.

***

p90

It is only when a society shares caring values, that its people
can feel secure.

***

The cost of being presented as "a responsible and serious
candidate" by the media [is] usually to show fundamental
agreement with the existing distribution of wealth and power.

***

p101

Governmental officials who originally entered public service
precisely because they desired to care for others soon discover
that they are not rewarded for the degree of caring they show
to the public. On the contrary, such concerned behavior is seen
as soft and foolishly idealistic. The task of government workers
is to administer people and things, to provide benefits or services
that are often underfunded-and hence, incapable of achieving the
goals for which they were created. Overextended in demand and
greeted with suspicion or outright hostility by some recipients
of the services that they provide, government officials soon develop
a protective emotional shell that makes it difficult for them
to act in a way that conveys genuine caring to the public. At
best, what the public receives is objective caring (namely, some
service or economic benefit is really being given to them) in
a way that does not feel subjectively, genuinely caring.

As a result, even though we continually benefit from government
services that may objectively represent our mutual generosity
and willingness to care for others, it is very rare for us to
feel that

we directly experience that generosity and caring. Even services
that are provided efficiently and at relatively low cost, such
as the U.S. Mail, rarely feel like a manifestation of collective
caring. Our actual benevolence is rendered invisible, and hence
fails to create in us the sense that we belong to a world that
benefits from mutual goodness and generosity of spirit, as manifested
through the mechanisms of government.

***

p102

People's reluctance to pay taxes is far stronger in class-dominated
societies ... In those societies, [where] taxpayers began to suspect
that he wealth ' appropriated from them [is] not being used for
the common good, but for the benefit of a particular class or
group.

***

p103

Tax revolts and growing support for cuts in government services
have spread through much of the Western world in the closing decades
of the twentieth century. These are products of a popular conception
that government is not working-that it has not been solving societal
problems, has ignored the plight of middle-income people, and
has become captive to "special interests."

The perception that "government isn't working" has
resulted partially from a powerful conservative campaign to debunk
all government spending in order to reduce the tax load on the
rich and the corporations and to undermine the government's ability
to implement environmental, health-and-safety, and other societally
oriented regulations of the economy. To be successful, conservatives
have had to focus people's attention away from popular programs
like the G.I. Bill, Social Security, and other middle-class entitlements,
and away from the important impact that Great Society programs
have had in helping to create a black middle class. Instead, conservative
critics have emphasized the persistence of poverty and crime,
which government has failed to end.

The willingness of many Americans to accept this conservative
redefinition of reality is connected to a deepening understanding
by the electorate that liberal reforms have not eliminated social
problems, but have only tried to soften their worst impact. After
decades of funding "poverty" programs, poverty has persisted.
Of course, the liberal programs have never actually been oriented
toward a systematic restructuring of the economy in ways that
would wipe out poverty (such as serious income redistribution,
coupled with guaranteed full employment at respectable wages for
every person who wishes to work). In fact, left-wing radicals
have always criticized liberal programs precisely because these
have been too timid. Liberals who have justified on pragmatic
grounds their tinkering with the system, rather than adopting
more far-reaching measures, must now face the reality that it
might have been more pragmatic in the long run to fight for larger
social transformations that might have produced more dramatic
and popular outcomes.

People certainly have been correct to perceive that the programs
they have funded have not eliminated the problems. Looking ahead
to decades of paying for programs that do not seem to make a dent
in the basic problems of the poor and that ignore the crises of
meaning in their own lives, many people conclude that they would
rather keep their money in their own pockets rather than pay higher
taxes.

***

p109

All systems of inequality and oppression require some type
of justificatory belief system, precisely because they contradict
our more fundamental recognition of others as having the same
legitimate claim to be valued as we do ourselves.

Racism, sexism, and the like are forms of selfishness that
have been institutionalized in a system that gives us alleged
reasons why / we should have more of the world's goods than others
do (be those goods material or spiritual). No wonder, then, that
our current system-which has universalized the principle of selfishness-has
produced a world abounding in racism and its brother, xenophobic
nationalism. These behaviors are no more than the principle of
selfishness acting itself out in national, ethnic, or racial terms.

***

p123

Liberals have important ideas to contribute to American politics.
But without a politics-of-meaning framework, liberal ideas often
foster a way of thinking that creates a society very different
from what many liberals hope for.

Most liberals in America actually oppose the triumph of the
market. Yet their political philosophy seems so congruent with
the ethos of selfishness and individualism that it is easy for
conservatives to blame all of societal dissolution on liberal
political ideas. The Right is then able to turn people against
what is good in liberalism, because most Americans are fed up
with a world that seems to continually frustrate their desires
for connection, caring, and idealism. The Right convinces people
that it is the liberals' fault that there have been declines in
ethical and spiritual sensitivity, in solidarity, and in mutual
trust.

The great irony here is that the Right manages to resent the
Left for fomenting the individualism and selfishness that is in
fact generated by the economic system that the Right extols. Liberals
take the rap for the capitalist market! Liberalism does not have
an adequate response, because it cannot claim commitment to a
particular vision of a good society without violating its prior
commitment to have no commitments-except to a political procedure
that guarantees individuals the right to go for whatever they
want. This hands-off approach to a substantive vision of the good
simply will not work anymore.

Some liberals believe that there is a danger in my argument.
If liberalism adopts a specific vision in politics, they warn,
they will be unable to ensure that the Right will not also introduce
its vision, and maybe the latter will be the one that wins out.
So, they conclude, liberals are better off trying to fight for
a state that has no substantive commitments.

This concern is legitimate, but out of date. The Right's political
vision already is prevailing-precisely because liberals offer
nothing more than a promise of individual rights, economic entitlements,
and inclusion that inadequately speaks to the fundamental needs
of the American people. When liberals fight to keep values and
spiritual visions out of the public arena, they only manage to
succeed in keeping out their own values and visions. And this
absence has left a clear path for the Right to put forward its
vision and to win popular support.

Some liberal groups have protested the political role assumed
by the Christian Coalition, the Moral Majority, or other religion-based
political organizations. Religion, they argue, should be kept
out of public life. Such liberals face a losing battle, both because
the first amendment does not prohibit religious groups from advocating
their political vision, and because most people actually want
a meaning-based political framework.

The problem with the religious Right is not that it is advocating
politics, but that the content of its politics is based on a perversion
of religious values. Instead of building on the Bible's injunctions
to love our neighbor, thus bringing glory to God by showing that
a theological view of the universe would maximize our caring and
compassion for others, these people build on isolated biblical
passages that reflect fear and anger. In my book, Jewish Renewal:
A Path to Healing and Transformation, I present in some detail
a reading of the Bible that could form the basis of a full-bodied
alternative to these right-wing distortions. But my point here
for liberals is that they must combat the Right's vision with
a better and more engaging one that goes far beyond their traditional
principles of freedom, economic security, and inclusion.

As a final note, I should add that I have learned a lot from
liberals and the Left. While I find little to admire in the corporate
liberals who have shaped congressional policies to their own interests,
I have a great deal of respect for the hundreds of thousands of
liberal activists who gave their life energies to build the labor
movement, the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the
women's movement, the gay and lesbian movements, the environmental
movement, and the movements for civil liberties and human rights.

Through generations of struggle, these people have held high
a vision of hope and possibility against seemingly overwhelming
odds. Their accomplishments are impressive, including the winning
of basic protections and rights for working people, eliminating
segregation, decreasing discrimination against women and minorities,
weakening the hold of patriarchal assumptions throughout the society,
protecting us from repressive interventions of the state, and
providing a modicum of dignity for the aging and the disabled.
It would be a terrible mistake to ignore this record of accomplishments.

And yet, liberalism is on the decline.

To the extent that liberals are trapped within a worldview
that excludes human spiritual and ethical needs, they misunderstand
what it is to be a human being, and hence are unable to acknowledge
the ways in which our society frustrates the natural hunger for
recognition and meaning. Consequently, they develop political
strategies which are one-dimensional and increasingly unpopular.
Revamping the "old-time religion" with a better spokesperson
or a new party will not change this situation. Liberalism needs
to be transcended-and the way to do so without losing the important
insights and contributions of liberalism is to create a progressive
movement for a politics of meaning. Otherwise, liberals will continue
to feel the pressure of public disaffection and continue to misinterpret
their decline in popularity as a mandate to buy into conservative
assumptions. Thus, if by chance public revulsion at the extremism
of the Gingrich Congress produces a Democratic victory in 1996
and the reelection of President Clinton, these Democrats will
be unlikely to return to a visionary liberalism that extends and
renews the most progressive aspects of liberal philosophy. Rather,
having positioned themselves increasingly as people who share
conservative assumptions about the budget, the immediate need
to eliminate the deficit, and the need to dramatically limit the
power of government in many spheres, we can expect that the Democrats
will present our country with politics that in many ways resembles
the liberal wing of Republican President George Bush's administration.

Yet, public disaffection with liberalism does not mean that
people want a more centrist politics or some elusive mush that
the press refers to as "the moderate center." The failures
of liberalism call not for a move to the Right, nor for a move
to the Left (that is, a militant revival of the old one-dimensional
assumptions of an economistic and rights-oriented liberalism),
but rather for a move to transcend the old ways of thinking and
begin to acknowledge the meaning-needs that liberalism cannot
fully grasp within the limits of its existing categories. Because
liberals do not understand this, they find themselves trapped
in a fruitless debate between those who imagine that they will
be more popular by moving to the Right and those who advocate
a return to a pure version of the old-time liberal or Left politics.
Both views are mistaken for reasons I've explained in this chapter.

***

p 216

A Social Audit

A politics of meaning aims to shift the bottom line from a
focus on profit or other material values to a focus on ethical,
spiritual, social, and ecological values. Accordingly, the productivity
or efficiency or rationality of any given program is to be judged
by these criteria.

To ensure for ourselves that we are on this path, people in
a meaning-oriented society will institute a "social audit"-a
social and environmental impact report to accompany every annual
investment plan, every project, and every proposed piece of legislation,
regulation, or budget item. A social audit will be sought from
every corporation; civic institution; community project; and local,
state or federal agency and legislative body.

The underlying notion here is that every institution, and
every proposed policy or piece of legislation, has a group of
stake-holders. These are all the people who will be affected by
the operations of the institution or the outcome of the policy
or legislation, and who therefore have a stake in knowing and
shaping these outcomes. For example, for a company producing infant
formula, the stake-holders would include not only the shareholders,
employees, and management of the firm, but all the families whose
children consume the product, as well as the community in which
the plant is located. Not everyone will be a stockholder in every
venture. But for stake-holders, the social audit will be an important
tool of empowerment, and one for which a politics of meaning will
fight.

The goal of the audit will be to determine the likely consequences
of an institution or a policy or a piece of legislation on the
psychological, spiritual, and ethical well-being of our society
and of individuals within it. Requiring ourselves to think about
these goals will help us renew on a daily basis the connection
between our specific projects and our sense of the common good.

Liberal reforms have tended to focus largely on predictable,
"objective" outcomes. A politics-of-meaning approach,
by contrast, questions the predictable subjective outcomes as
well: for example, whether the prevailing emotional climate that
then takes hold throughout society makes it more or less likely
that people will feel safe to trust one another more, and to act
in mutually caring or morally sensitive ways. Over the course
of the past thirty years, liberals have passed some fine pieces
of legislation, but they rarely have challenged the prevailing
emotional climate of our society- one that has become, under the
influence of right-wing movements and ideologues, increasingly
mean-spirited. Liberal reforms are now being undermined or rolled
back by the conservative beneficiaries of that mean-spirited climate,
swept to electoral victory on a tide of anger at liberals who
have failed to address the crisis of meaning in the lives of middle-income
Americans.

***

p237

The Goal of the Economy

It is easy to have utopian fantasies, but who is going to
pay for all these wonderful ideas, and how can an economy function
that is committed to such "unrealistic" ideals?

Let's start by asking ourselves, in the instructive words
of James Fallows, "What's an economy for?" It is easy
here to fall back into the thought patterns of the old paradigm,
to imagine that the only way to judge an economy is in terms of
the degree to which it produces "hard" or externally
measurable, material goods. However, there is nothing self-evident
about this conceptualization.

From a politics-of-meaning standpoint, the goal of an economy
is to reproduce what the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein called
"a particularly human form of life." An economy must
have mechanisms for producing food and other essential goods,
such as clothing and housing. But an economy must also sustain
human beings, both physically and socially, with all our complexities
and desires. One of the component elements in reproducing "a
particularly human form of life" is that the process of doing
this must itself be a part of the life that we seek to reproduce.
Therefore, the way that we reproduce human life-both in terms
of creating food and essential goods, and in terms of sustaining
human beings physically and socially-is part of our evaluation
of an economy's success. If there were an economy that could produce
more food and more essential goods, by harnessing human labor
in such a way that each of us died at age seventeen after years
of painful forced labor, we probably would not judge that economy
to be a powerful success, despite its greater "productivity"
according to one narrow standard.

The goal of the economy should be to help produce and sustain
humans who are capable of realizing their highest capacities for
love; creativity; intelligence; mutual recognition; solidarity;
productive work; freedom; caring and nurturing; intimacy; commitment;
trust; vitality; and aesthetic, ethical, spiritual, and ecological
sensitivity. The materialist conception that promoting these capacities
is difficult when people face material deprivation is correct,
but needs to be qualified. There are, and have been throughout
human history, societies that more successfully actualize these
capacities than some of our contemporary advanced industrial societies,
even though these others produce less, materially speaking. In
my view, these societies have had a stronger economy-one that
we ought to deem more productive and generating a higher standard
of living.

The way we organize the production and distribution of goods
and services is linked intrinsically to the way we reproduce the
human species, both physically and socially. For example, how
we arrange for the care and nurturing of children is as much an
economic question as how we arrange for the planting of seeds
in the earth, O£ for the resulting harvest. However, the
economic import of child-rearing appears to be invisible, which
is a consequence of the success of patriarchy in having assigned
this work to women, not paid for it, and then defined it as "not
real work." Those same patriarchal assumptions have held
throughout our economy, so that wherever we have work associated
with caring and nurturing, it typically is devalued and underpaid,
when paid for at all. Similarly, how we organize the world of
work, and the consequences for human relationships, is as much
an economic question as the consequences for the production of
goods. Separating these issues only seems reasonable once we have
adopted the materialist and individualist account of human reality
that this book seeks to challenge.

***

Go for your highest vision of how you could serve the common
good if the bottom line in your profession were caring.

***

p 291

Ethical Impact Reports (Social Audits)

This demand is straightforward: every major piece of legislation
by a city council, state legislature, or Congress; every policy
decision by the White House; every annual stockholders' report
on the activities of major corporations, both for profit and nonprofit-
each of these should be accompanied by an ethical impact report...

Nevertheless, we will need to watch out for a high level of
obfuscation. Some corporations or government agencies might hire
new grant writers ("ethical impact specialists") whose
job would be to add words like "caring" or "ethically
sensitive" without any corresponding change in what people
actually were doing. There will have to be vigilant monitoring
by self-constituted groups of citizens who are serious about a
politics of meaning, and who challenge government and corporate
entities to actually live up to their fine words and to reorganize
themselves in ways that are sensitive to the ethical impact of
their actions. This struggle can be part of the process of the
transition to a different society. When public debate focuses
on whether a policy really produces moral and spiritual awareness,
rather than on whether it yields the biggest bang for the buck,
we already will have made a start toward developing the consciousness
necessary for building a very different kind of society.

***

p292

Hazel Henderson, a policy analyst, has pioneered a standard
called Country Futures Indicators (CFI) that may point us in the
right direction. Some of its measures include purchasing-power
parity and income distribution (whether the poverty gap is widening
or narrowing), informal household-sector production (measuring
both paid and unpaid work done at home), depletion of nonrenewable
resources, military-civilian budget ratio (measuring how military
production depletes a country's wealth), and capital-asset account
(measuring the value of public roads and other infrastructural
resources)

Henderson also includes the following significant factors:
birth and infant-mortality rates, population density, age distribution,
health and nutrition (including calories consumed per day and
protein-carbohydrate ratio), availability and quality of shelter
(including degree of homelessness), crime rates, literacy rates,
level of political participation and status of democratic processes
(including impact of money on elections), status of minority and
ethnic populations and of women (including protection of minority
rights), levels of air and water quality and environmental pollution,
degree of biodiversity and species loss, and level of cultural
and recreational resources available.